1. Shannon SpanhakeTalks Innovation & Smarter Cities
The Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation was established in January 2012 when San Francisco
Mayor Ed Lee appointed Jay Nath as the City’s first Chief Innovation Officer. Shannon Spanhake
joined the City as Deputy Innovation Officer shortly thereafter, working with a not-so-secret
agenda to lower the barriers of entry to working with government and to find new ways for
government to support innovation.
With a very small team and limited financial resources, the Office of Civic Innovation focuses on
public/private/people partnerships and also whatthey refer to as "the platform-play." That is,
creating a platform for innovation to generate more innovation. Rather than administering
programs, they look for opportunities to open underutilized resources, modify policies or create
new partnerships that catalyze innovation.
During her presentation at Swissnex, Shannon gave some examples of the platform-play:

2. In 2009, San Francisco became the first City in the U.S. to have Open Data legislation. Since its
launch, over 200 government datasets have been posted to DataSF.org and nearly 100
applications have been built at no direct cost to the City. Living Labs Global was instrumental in
bringing Socrata to the City of San Francisco to power its Open Data Cloud service.
In April 2012, the Office of Civic Innovation launched ImproveSF.com, a crowd-sourcing platform
that empowers San Franciscans to submit ideas for city-wide problems. Over 20,000
interactions have taken place on the platform and it has been used to crowdsource the latest
version of the SF Public Library Card and tackle food justice in the blighted Central Market
neighborhood.
With the success of Open Data, the City realized that opening underutilized assetscould spur
innovation, create jobs, improve government efficiency, and enhance quality of life for
residents. It is now exploring what other assets might be open-sourced. The Living Innovation
Zones initiative will enable the use of City assets as demonstration sites for new and emerging

3. innovations. Organizations would partner with City departments to showcase new technologies
or demonstrate innovative solutions to citywide problems.
Living Innovation Zones came about as a result of interest from the private sector and a
realization that government agencies were facing administrative hurdles as they attempted to
launch their own pilot projects. The goal of Living Innovation Zones is to spur more
demonstration projects such as the SFPUC pilot of Paradox Lighting Equipment, a winner of the
2012 Living Labs Global Award, which was discussed later in the evening.
Through these initiatives, the Office of Civic Innovation is breaking down silos of government to
create innovative partnerships across departments and between government and the private
sector. These Public-Private-People partnerships enable the Office to support and cultivate the
local ecosystem of innovation that makes San Francisco the Innovation Capital of the World.
For more information visit:
http://www.innovatesf.com
@SFMOCI
@ShannonSpanhake